“They” disturb me to the depths of my most humble freedom, with their money, their work, their authority, their duties, their guilt, their intellectuality, their roles, their functions, their sense of power, their law of exchange, their brotherly community, of which I am a part without wanting to be. That’s why I’ve spoken of economists with the same sense of distance that Marx and Engels discovered between the filth and misery of London and the society of these extraterrestrials with “their” Parliament, “their” Westminster, “their” Buckingham Palace, and “their” Newgate. In fact, I am not a stranger to this world, though everything about this world that sells itself instead of giving itself away is foreign to me - including the economic reflex into which my gestures and acts sometimes fold themselves. Today it is a question of discovering oneself in the authenticity of one’s existence, even if, having lived poorly, the least illusion often seems preferable - since, in its brutal franchising, the irrepressible desire for another life is already what constitutes this life. Of course, I would be very displeased if I were to stupidly add to the slavery of running after the monthly rent money by subscribing to some brand image, to some journalistic or televised labeling, to a role – prestigious or derisory, it matters little – if I were to make myself miserable by falling into some mediated classification within the cultural state of commodity society.
On the other hand, there’s nothing that I love more than the clarity of choice that I have at each instant in spite of the maze of constraints, which is my chance to lay down my chips on the neverending quest for love, creation, and the enjoyment of myself, outside of which I recognize no worthwhile destiny. My living fully according to my desires is mixed up with the pleasure I take from writing in order to clarify my thoughts on the pleasure of living better (and this is the only use of writing that I agree with fully), of living out more fully the fears and doubts that issue from compromises and compatibilities that are foreign to me and that render me a stranger to myself. And the intelligence of the self is certainly the least shared thing there is in an era whose only intelligence is the science of perfecting the absurd and growing inadequacy of living. It is not easy to fall in love every day with the life we have to create when every day predisposes us to fatigue, aging, and death. The weakness of this enterprise is less the fault of the babblings and uncertainties through which this new reality is trying to express itself, and rather more the fault of the invasion of the past, which perpetuates itself in spite of me. Is there anything more pathetic than a love letter? As regards the violence and passional serenity where the body discovers itself in its entirety, what word, what phrase, could contain that affection, that preciousness? Think about the ridiculous effect that love letter would have, if it were to fail to come into the hands of he or she for whom it was written and instead ended up being read by the hotel clerk! But when it reaches the loved-one, then the words organize themselves according to the heart’s whim, tracing point by point a road already profoundly traveled, and they resonate with a harmony that only needed the simplicity of a few understandings drawn up randomly to propagate itself.Īll I’ve tried to do here is to tie together the resurgences of a desirable life, to note briefly a few measures of a symphony of the living, to bring out hints of another reality, which dominant thinking hides with its tireless reading and rereading of the words of a world trapped in books because of the boredom engendered by its slow death. What is true for the genius of art is even truer for the exuberant presence of the living. Called to justify his enthusiasm, the man, who turns out to be none other than the composer himself, explains: mediocre as it was, the evocation of his work revived in him not the excellence of the score, but the moving harmonies that had presided over its creation - the musical notes he had written could only provide an abstract sketch of those harmonies. In one of Hoffmann’s novels, the narrator is surprised by the rapture into which a man sitting at a table is plunged while listening to one of Gluck’s overtures, though it was performed awfully by a bunch of bar musicians.